Saturday, February 21, 2015

Public speaking, Blogging, and Networking Oh My!

Writing a talk is a new thing for me. I have over 1400 Youtube videos created,
and the process was always extremely simple. I just write out a small outline,
and read off each bullet point by expanding and free-form talking over it.

Now I have to keep several things in mind, such as what the audience is going to
see, and what time limit I am constrained to. Also what is the most important
information? It definitely is a new thing, but I am happy to be on the
challenge.

I started off by doing the outline format that I generally do with my videos,
and then kind of spoke through parts of the talk out loud, but then I thought
maybe I should write a bit of script...meh. I just am not a script person. It
feels so dirty.

Instead I think I'll just keep the outline, and time myself once or twice doing
the whole talk to make sure I am meeting the time limit while also covering
everything that I need to. If anything, I may just do a screencast version
beforehand, that way I am as prepared as I can be.

So, I went to the most recent meetup and found that I may be able to get in a
good talk for next month at the big web dev one. I'll definitely put forward
that idea, unless I come up with a different idea. I do notice that from what
I've seen, speakers stick to one talk and then iterate on it in multiple
settings so perhaps I'll do that. It would be cool to speak at one of the really
big conferences later.

I've finished up my resume, updated my LinkedIn, and got some basic styling done
for my new website / blog. I still have a lot of work to do there, but my goal
is to really have it at least functional by next week. I did take some time from
that task however to focus on getting this talk right, and also I spent a good
chunk of my usual free time with a friend who is moving and I won't see any
more.

I've been continuing to seek out communities where possible. I joined in on the
chat with #CodeNewbies, and joined RubyNewbies Slack team, as well as
CodeBuddies.org. I was considering posting up on Reddit with an offer to
pair/mentor new coders so that I could learn more by teaching, and if possible
attract someone better than me to be MY mentor. That is the one thing I still
haven't been able to find. I know that I can massively increase my progress if I
can find someone who would be that role for me.

I got a lot of bookmarks organized with really cool resources for learning
programming and various tools etc. I will probably create a resource page for
those things also and I think it will be very useful to other people.

The list of employers that would be great to work for is getting larger. VERY
soon, I believe that I'll start sending out apps to them. I do know that it
would be better if I could get contacts with people within those companies in
order to reference my way in. Perhaps I'll put together a plan to contact and
"stalk" some of them so that I can get in easier

Chances are, I'll wait to finalize the talk until my day off so that I can do it
with full voice. In the mornings, I have to be quiet so as to not wake up my
roommates. I mean, waking up at 3am I'd hate to use my booming talk voice to
practice haha.

For now, I'll work on putting together my portfolio and tying my whole landing
page experience together, and then move on to getting the blog at least
presentable for reading articles. It's such a good feeling to have a lot of
these things come together, although at the same time I know i have such a long
way to go. Good stuff!

That's it for now, see you next time...

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